


The transit

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [4]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: "Charlie", Asset POV, Ecology, Gen, No Spoilers, Trauma, now arriving Baltimore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-04
Updated: 2018-01-04
Packaged: 2019-02-26 05:06:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13228680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: After a terrible transit, an amphibian man becomes a dispossessed Asset, and two living beings make an impression on him.





	The transit

The world is wrong.

He knows what his home is only after losing it. Home is deep green water and deep green forest. Rightness is an ever-changing panoply of life, flowing around him and through his sensorium. The two-legged ones that had appeared suddenly amidst that, the graceful walkers shaped something like him – they compelled. His urges around them had brought him here. To be pained. Restrained. And, now, trapped in an irrational hell.

Every change makes his existence worse. Each time he had been moved, the space around him shrank more. Its water became more flat and stagnant to his gills. The space now barely lets him swim his limbs. The temperature fluctuates wildly. Some cave-like casing confines him. His scales are scraped by it. His back is bruised by it. Worst of all, his sensorium cannot feel through it. His attempts to sense echo back on him, aching. He focuses on the clear part of this prison, which lets some light and feeling through.

At times, there is noise. Something out there in the dryness utters a low, tortured cry, followed by sounds. “Central junction. Bawlmer. Now arriving Baltimore...”

More sounds follow. His constricted space is moved. As this progresses, he feels the great waters recede as never before. He throbs in agony, like a heart torn from a body. He fights the change, calls to the waters of life and what they hold. It is all useless. He sinks back against the encasing hardness, sapped, bereft of meaning.

But still existing. Aware that there would be more to endure.

The change that had sheared him and his home apart was vast, unthinkable.

It had given him time. Time for the torment of boredom, when, before, aeons had flowed, one day into the next. Time to cycle through memories, free enough of a present and future to finally be aware of the past. Time to learn fear and regret.

It had given him pain. Pain beyond beyond ambitious predators or the rare eras of great cold. Those brought suffering, but they were not wrong. The thousand agonies that have him now are. He knows this with all his being. 

A shocking bang rings the confine next to his head. More noise follows. “Enjoying your tuna can there, Charlie? Just wait 'till we open it up.” He does not understand. The two-legged ones change their sounds too often for them to have any meaning beyond the emotion they convey. But he recognizes. This is the one shaped the most like him, with the pink skin of a river dolphin. The one who’d come to him as a beacon of blazing emotion, ringing with terrible need. Only to betray him beyond comprehension. Now, that one stays attached to him like a lamprey. He braces for the blaze of power that one wields, the pain that breaks the world. It does not come. But it will, sooner or later.

He is seizing on every slight improvement for more endurance. Like now, when the sickening sense of movement changes. It becomes gentler, rolling. Some equilibrium returns to him.

His transit stops. He senses out the only way he can, through the clear areas.

New horror dawns. Wherever he is, the living sky is gone. Every surface is worse than stone, scraped of any veneer of green life. The light that leaks in his prison's clear part is strange, false. It is such dead illumination that it is almost a relief when a presence flutters over it.

There is no telling through the barrier if they are a two-legged one or another animal, bird or butterfly. The presence, as a mercy, blocks out the false light. They bestow the briefest touch on the clear part. He perceives a pad of flesh and its energy corona, small, alive. Somehow _right_.

Wild with need, he slams up towards it. Too late. It is gone.

He calls his own tortured cry, deep and long. As if it matters to anything out there.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of us in the fandom often refer to the Asset/the Amphibian Man as "Charlie" - [this Tumblr post has the reason why](https://shapeofh2o.tumblr.com/post/169275469921/bring-in-charlie-this-is-a-del-toro-wheeze-his) "Charlie" was del Toro's on-set name for the Amphibian Man. 
> 
> Thanks to the mastermind behind shapeofh2o.tumblr.com, it's a great one to follow!


End file.
